Nick Demopoulos

I have a lot of experience performing at many different types of events. If you hire me to work at your event you can guarantee that I will show up early, act professionally, look and dress appropriately for the event, and perform whatever music we planned on. I have worked at many of prominent jazz and music venues in New York and throughout the world. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Nick Demopoulos is a musician and technologist who’s worked professionally as a guitarist, sound designer, composer, musical director, educator and music therapist. He also builds and designs electronic musical instruments.
Nick worked with NEA Jazz master Chico Hamilton as a guitarist from 2008 to 2013, with whom he did numerous live appearances. He recorded on Chico Hamilton’s last three albums; The Inquiring Mind, Revelation and Euphoric. While working with Chico he also performed and recorded with NEA Jazz Master Jimmy Owens and trombone player George Bohannon.
Nick is a founding member of a long-standing jazz/electronic music group Exegesis, which was founded with bassist Danton Boller and drummer Greg Gonzalez and has released two albums, The Harmony of the Anomaly and The Order of Chaos. Iterations of this group have featured drummers Mark Giuliana, Dan Weiss, Mark Ferber, and vocalist Gretchen Parlato. In 2008 Exegesis was selected through a competitive audition process by Jazz at Lincoln Center and the U.S. Department of State to work as cultural diplomats for the U.S government in the field of music. In this capacity Exegesis traveled to conduct educational workshops and performances in Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, U.A.E and Kuwait. Other musicians he has worked with include Vernon Reid, Don McKenzie, Willie Jones the 3rd, God is My Copilot, vocalist Lizzy Yoder and Solsonics. Notable Exegesis performances include the Montreux Jazz Festival and the National Geographic Museum. Other Notable performances include at the L.A. County Museum of Art with the Nick Demopoulos jazz quartet, at the Film Center of Lincoln Center with Intrafaction, and as Smomid at the Whitney Museum of Art
In 2012 Nick was hired by choreographer Camille A. Brown to collaborate and compose music for a work she was creating called Memories. This work premiered at the Joyce Theater in New York by Complexions Contemporary Ballet in their 2012 season. The work composed for Memories was a solo guitar piece that Nick performed during this run at the Joyce Theater. It has since been performed with a recording of Nick playing the piece.
In 2012 Nick was the musical director and a collaborating composer for the play The Golden Veil, performed by the National Theater of the United States of America at the Kitchen in New York City. He also was a co-creator with playwrite Ford Wright in composing and producing two rock opera productions by International Fiction: Rhymes with Adventure (1999) and I, Medusa (2000). Rhymes with Adventure was listed in the Village Voice that year in its Best Of issue as one of the best theater pieces of that year, and I, Medusa.
As a sound designer Nick has collaborated with many theater directors, game designers, filmmakers and visual artists. He worked with visual artist Yorgo Alexopoulos in creating the sound design for his large scale, multi screen video installations Transmigrations (2012), No Feeling is Final (2010), and The Infinite Sphere (2007). They also collaborated on a permanent multi channel audio-visual installation in the lobby of the Milford Hotel in the Times Square area of New York City that was installed in 2013. His sound design work for Yorgo Alexopoulos has also been shown in the Torrance Museum of art and the Laguna Museum of Art in 2019/2020. Additionally he has created sound design for an event at the Guggenheim Museum, for many varied projects at Q Department, and a video game for Digital Prunes.
In 2015 Nick started working with two not for profit organizations, Music That Heals and Concerts in Motion, to perform music for those who might benefit from it for therapeutic reasons, or for those who don’t have access to live music performances. Since working with these agencies Nick has performed at Veterans Hospitals in Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens NY, several drug rehabilitation facilities, for audiences affected by PTSD and other psychological problems, United Cerebral Palsy, concerts for home bound senior citizens, for senior citizens with Alzheimer’s disease and Dementia, at Calvary Hospice Hospital, NYU Langone Medical Center and the NYU Cancer Center, among other venues. He usually conducts 8 to 12 of these concerts a month.
In 2009, after taking a class at the Lemurplex in Gowanus Brooklyn, Nick began to make midi controllers, which eventually led to creating the first Smomid, the name being an acronym for string modeling midi device. This is an instrument that has no acoustic properties, is shaped like a guitar and has long resistors that resemble strings. The instrument also has numerous other sensors, like joysticks, pressure sensors, potentiometers and buttons. This instrument also has twelve high-powered LEDs that emit light to give the user visual feed back. After this first instrument Nick has made many other instruments and that are variations on this concept. An instrument called a Pyramidi was first completed in 2012. This instrument is a scaled down version of a Smomid that fits in a backpack. In 2015 Nick created a Smomid Table, which resembles a pedal steel guitar, is played sitting down, has seventy-seven high powered RGB LEDs, four 7 segment LED displays and four LED 16 X 8 matrix displays that create visual representations of sounds the instrument is creating. In 2017 Nick created two variations on his Pyramidi instrument where the housing was 3D modeled and CNC cut out of Corian. He also made a variation of his Smomid design that was completely 3D modeled and CNC cut out of wood. The most recent prototype designs Nick has created are completely self contained instruments that are battery powered and require no outside equipment other than audio amplification. These instruments are designed to be used by anyone, including those with no musical or technological training, all that is required to use them is to turn them on and to plug them into an audio amplifier.
For his work with the Smomid, Nick has been featured on the All American Makers Show on Discovery Channel and has performed at Lincoln Center in New York, the LoveTech 10 year anniversary event in Oakland, CA (2019) and the 2017 New York City Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit, among others. Smomid has been featured in the press and web outlets Guitar World, Guitar Aficionado, Electronic Sound, the Arduino Blog, Create Digital Music, BOMB Magazine, (link hidden), Popular Noise Magazine and Metal Injection¬ among others. His instruments have been featured in the group art exhibitions Sonare at the Sideshow Gallery (Brooklyn, NY 2016), Sonic City at the City Reliquary Museum (Brooklyn, NY 2016) and Future Pi (Brooklyn, NY 2015). Nick has also conducted educational workshops at NYU ITP program, Brooklyn College, University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tufts University, UCLA and Santa Monica College to speak with both visual art and music students about various subjects including interface design, music composition, synthesis, computer interactivity, interactive sculpture and microcontrollers. He has released three full-length albums created solely with the instruments he created, Pyramidi Scheme (2019), A Smoment in Time (2017) and Rhythms of Light (2015).
Nick has a B.A from University of Southern California in Music Performance and a MFA from the Brooklyn College Performance Interactive Media Art program (PIMA).

For my technical needs I would prefer a chair and an electrical outlet. If those can't be provided I can bring a chair and I do have a battery powered set up, but I would need to know in advance.